Watching Wedding Pullav is an experience so traumatising that it’s likely to keep the viewer off weddings and pullavs for months after leaving the theatre. The film’s essentially My Best Friend’s Wedding meets Jaane Tu… Ya Jaane Na — a tale of two best friends discovering their love for each other, almost when they’re married to other people — but told so amateurishly that one wonders how the cinematographer of films like Rang De Basanti, Devdas and Munna Bhai M.B.B.S could have made such a film.
The film opens with the engagement ceremony of automobile designer Aditya (Diganth Manchale) and Ria (Sonalli Sehgall), the scion of a motorcycle manufacturer. The groom-to-be insists that they wait for his best friend to arrive before exchanging rings. As they wait, a wedding band arrives from nowhere and plays music. Naturally, the attention of the crowd is drawn to this noise, and from among the band members emerges an actress who looks a lot like Priyanka Chopra. It’s all slow motion from then on, as her friends cheer her name — Anushka (played by Anushka Ranjan) — and we learn that she’s the groom’s best friend. I have never seen such an elaborate entry scene for such an anonymous actor. It soon becomes obvious that the film is going to revolve around her and you’re not quite sure why there’s so much importance surrounding a newcomer. I learned through a quick Google search that she’s, perhaps not coincidentally, the daughter of the film’s producer. That explains why there are as many as five scenes that talk about how beautiful she is. It even explains a title card in the beginning of the film that reads ‘Special costumes for Anushka’, at which point I assumed Anushka Sharma would be making a special appearance. Heck, her parents even roped in Rishi Kapoor (he plays cupid in the film) to deliver cheesy lines about their daughter, which includes “You’re not just beautiful, you’re also intelligent. That’s a lethal combination.”
So, what was to be the story of the wedding of Aditya and Ria also becomes about Anushka and her painter boyfriend ‘J’, when Aditya suggests that both couples get married together in Thailand. As the film meanders through one wedding function to another (they even manage to weave in karva chauth into this), it becomes clear to Aditya and Anushka that they are more than just friends; and yet, they never seem to open up about it and let us go home soon. At this point, their love story becomes obvious to their friends, parents, relatives, the hotel’s general manager and perhaps even Matt Damon sitting on Mars. Yet they keep dragging it, so Anushka gets a chance to use up her wardrobe budget and wear a dress in every colour.
How about going a little deeper into the minds of the people they seem to be trampling over? How about a backstory of how they became such good friends? How about a few jokes to make the proceedings a bit more bearable? It’s sad to see all these young actors in a film with so little inventiveness. In its present state, I would prefer hunger to this pullav.
